the normal content is too easy

[HyoMinPark]

The truth is that no matter how hard a dungeon is, if you do it every single night, it's going to seem easy.

Dungeons are easy the first time you do them. Occasionally you might meet one that has some spice, but they aren’t that common. The ones that come to mind are OG Stone Vigil, Aurum Vale, The Vault in HW (before it was nerfed), Bardam’s Mettle, and Holminster Switch.

I have yet to run a dungeon in this game that I didn't die on my first run through. Maybe you're a gaming prodigy who instinctively understands and responds to every mechanic before you're even aware that it exists, but as far as I'm concerned, the difficulty for dungeons and normal raids seems about right.

I could count on maybe one hand how many dungeons I’ve wiped on or died in the first time I ran them. I’m certainly not a gaming prodigy. If we’re going to compare anecdotes, mine directly contradicts yours. With the exception of a handful, they are simply facerolls. Especially the “expert” dungeons.

Occasionally there will be a normal mode raid that will wipe a party of newcomers, but that’s primarily due to gotcha mechanics. Not inherent difficulty. Same with Alliance raids. Rhalgr wiped alliances of newcomers repeatedly when released. That was mostly because we didn’t know he could summon fists and punch players off the arena. Or people messed up the knock back he does. But none of those mechanics are difficult to understand or execute.

I die a lot at first, and then I gradually get to a point where everything is second nature, and then I can queue in a healing role and laugh at the new players as I bring them back up. The fact that the content is easy enough to be cleared despite a few deaths in the group is what enables me to laugh through that experience.

The content is easy enough that you can have 20 deaths and still clear. All you really need is one competent healer and/or a semi-decent tank. A competent healer alone can keep an entire party alive in an 8-man or 24-man because two healers aren’t even needed in there. You technically don’t even need a full 24 people. The day Tower at Paradigm’s Breach launched, I was in a run where 12 players killed the first boss because the first knock back he does blew the majority off the ledge. And instead of waiting for us to pick them up (there were still healers alive), they just immediately returned. The ones that didn’t picked up the bodies that remained and we kept going.

[Packetdancer]

I could count on maybe one hand how many dungeons I’ve wiped on or died in the first time I ran them. I’m certainly not a gaming prodigy. If we’re going to compare anecdotes, mine directly contradicts yours. With the exception of a handful, they are simply facerolls. Especially the “expert” dungeons.

Being fair here, this game has a specific 'toy box' of mechanics components it tends to use; you don't need to be a gaming prodigy to recognize them and quickly put together how mechanics work, especially if you have done savage content, or any other sort of serious endgame stuff; higher-end content in this game tends to give you a lot of practice at quickly recognizing which "LEGO bricks" are being used to build a specific mechanic and reacting accordingly.

(It's one reason I love fights that bring new or different pieces into play.)

To folks who are used to watching ground AoEs, I've run into many who view a mechanic as a monolithic whole; as a result, a new dungeon is a whole set of new mechanics. Whereas for folks who are used to doing endgame content, most I know -- myself included -- think of mechanics as basically individual building blocks stuck together; that means a new dungeon is generally the same mechanics, just maybe shuffled around.

And I think the difference that mindset makes in terms of how new content lands is a bigger one than it might appear to be at first glance.

Which is why one set of folks can say "It's new content, getting the mechanics wrong a few times is what happens." and another can say "It's just the same old thing we've seen dozens of times." and both can be correct from their respective points of view.

I don't expect much from normal content but any old content should be balanced to be as similar as possible to when they launched to at least retain the normal level of difficulty. People skip and ignore so much mechanics in old fights that the supposed normal difficulty is very easy instead.

I think the power creep on older content is less by design and more a factor of the fact that this game's level syncing (and ilevel syncing) is... well, it's sure a thing we have, but I'm not sure it's a thing that entirely works. Locking content to the minimum ilevel would prevent some of that power creep, but a lot of people -- and this certainly applies to some savage raiders -- would probably balk at that, because it would make gear progression feel "meaningless".

(No lie, though, I'd love to see the functional ilevel on the Crystal Tower raids cut down significantly, so that mechanics happened again there. Not because the game needs more difficulty overall, per se, but because those ones have gotten to the point where people overpower them so absurdly that quite a few folks I know who think the MSQ difficulty for current content is their preferred level still have their own complaints about how toothless the Crystal Tower raids specifically have become.)